Garshasp Review

What's a Garshasp?

We've seen a number of God of War clones over the years, and that's not entirely a bad thing. There's something relaxing about a brutal beat-em-up action game that you can zone out in. These kind of games need to go big, though, and unfortunately Garshasp can't go big enough. It tries, but it doesn't come close to matching the epic feel of the games it's copying.

For those that didn't study Persian mythology, Garshasp is a fabled warrior who kills monsters, most notably a serpent monster guy, Zahhak. Garshasp the game is presented like a fable. As you run through cities, temples, and jungles, a narrator tells the story of Garshasp and the perils that face him. It has a neat storybook element to it, but unfortunately most of the time the narration is indecipherable because every other word is in another language. It's cool to have a God of War style game that stars a Persian hero who is actually part of Persian mythology and not Jake Gyllenhaal with a fake British accent, but without any dialogue and only a couple limited cutscenes, it's hard to get into the story.

Ground pound!

Garshasp is a standard action platformer. You've got two attack buttons and you run around hacking at all the little goblins and monsters that pop out of the ground. The game has a leveling system and as you level up you earn new combo attacks that prove more effective against the stronger enemies. There are also bigger enemies that require quick time events to defeat, so the game is not entirely a button masher. The combos are easy to pull off and the difficulty progression is gradual enough where you can play through naturally, and not get frustrated.

Still, the combat becomes tiresome about halfway through the game, which is less than six hours long. The mini bosses are underwhelming because they barely react to the angry Persian Conan beating the crap out of them. And the quick time events that end the bigger monsters are lackluster. It's not that the game is all that bad, but there are a half dozen much better games in this style.

The Verdict

Garshasp wants to be God of War, but has less of everything that makes the series cool. It's fun, but is too low budget to compete with the other epic games in the genre. The story is where the game had an advantage, but unfortunately it drops the ball with the weird narration, lack of dialogue, and limited cutscenes. At only $20 it may be cheap enough for some, but with games like the God of War collection and Dante's Inferno being cheap now, it's hard to justify this game.